Fighting the war without a scratch

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Winston Churchill famously said of Charles de Gaulle in
the early days of World War II, when the French were
working (as usual) both sides and de Gaulle was the only
French ally available: "I know that every man must bear his
cross, but why must mine be the Cross of Lorraine?"

George W. Bush might imagine
that his cross is the media, or that
snotty small part of it that's
beginning to try to mimic the war
correspondents of Saigon, circa
1968. The "coalition" is only five
days into the war in Iraq, barely
60 miles south of Baghdad and
fighting only skirmishes and taking
almost no casualties at all, and
some of the media notabilities
(whose experience in uniform was
limited to the Cub Scouts) are
muttering "Vietnam," talking
"quagmire" and demanding a change in "strategy."

George W. and Tony Blair are going out of their way -
far, far out of their way - to liberate and not conquer.

Never in any of our wars has a commander in chief so
limited the scope of weaponry in taking out a regime. Lincoln
loosed Sherman on a civilian population, targeting private
homes and farms and slaughtering livestock to burn, pillage
and starve a helpless population into submission, and gave
him three whole months to carve a path of death and
desolation from Atlanta to Savannah and the sea. Eisenhower
suffered no shackles in liberating Europe, and the French and
Belgian towns and farms, which were friendly territory,
nevertheless were battered and bruised as the only way to
dislodge the Nazi armies. Lyndon Johnson and Robert
McNamara insisted on micromanaging the Vietnam war from
Washington to disastrous consequences, but not to spare the
countryside. Villages were wasted and towns were
devastated in the drive to destroy the invading communists.

The war in Iraq is unique. Iraqi morale is held to be at
least as important as the morale of soldiers and Marines.
Iraqis greeted the Americans with cheers and demands for
the promised groceries. The Marines were even ordered to
take down the American flag they had raised after taking the
port city of Umm Qasr. When an American officer was
murdered by one of his own men, everyone tiptoed around
the elephant in the parlor, the fact that the suspect soldier is a
recent convert to radical Islam, lest the feelings of Muslims be
bruised. The U.S. government has even dispatched
"counselors" to "counsel" the troops in the wake of the first
accounts that Americans had been slain and others captured.
(The last time an American general "counseled" a soldier who
needed psychiatric help it cost George S. Patton his
command.)

The president and his men, notably Don Rumsfeld, have
tried to stifle the widespread media speculation that the war
would be over in a week, which is about the time it takes for
the Israelis (who fight under no instructions to be polite) to
subdue an Arab coalition. Nobody was listening, because the
media, particularly the TV anchorpersons, had adopted the
story line that the war had to be swift, sweet and painless to
be successful. Even Wall Street swooned with anticipation,
with the Dow Jones Industrial Average soaring nearly a
thousand points in a week, and the price of oil dropped
dramatically when it looked like the Iraqi tap would soon be
turned on full force.

Some of television's talking heads are concerned because
Tommy Franks has ordered his men (and women) to look for
roads to Baghdad that go around troublesome towns, where
Iraqi troops with nothing to lose are mounting ambushes and
devising surprises of treachery and deception. By now, as
anyone who has been glued to the tube knows, the coalition
was supposed to be comfortably in Baghdad with the new
Iraqi government dispensing random acts of kindness and
George W. was meant to be on his way to the Mall to
dedicate a monument to the men and women of the war in
Iraq, all of whom had come home without a scratch.

The columnist George Will once speculated that if
television cameras had been present on Bloody Lane at
Antietam a traveler today would need a visa to go from
Washington to Alexandria. (Nothing wrong with that, of
course; President Condoleezza Rice, the Georgian president
of the Confederate States of America, would be directing the
mighty Army of Northern Virginia toward Baghdad this
morning.) American grunts with psyches cosseted by modern
media would have never made it off the beach at Normandy.

Fortunately for all of us, the young men (and women)
driving toward Baghdad are better, tougher, stronger than
some people are telling us they are. They know what they're
doing, and they're doing it.